I totally agree kevincharley & rolysb. It has got far too confusing lately. The original system was much better. Why all the different options, surely you only need one button to click on to access the competition and get the answer, and then click to confirm you have entered it, and ladder and cc points are meaningless.

Totally agree with Miketerry and Pippin. I love this site for the competitions. It is brilliant value for money. The ladder is a bit of harmless fun. Please stop the criticism. Life is too short to get so upset about a ladder!

I have not looked at the ladder for a while as it has long been accepted that it is meaningless and the points and coins are worthless. However I am amazed that despite entering every competition this month I am am behind 2 other competitors by more than 40 points.How can this be?

Loopholes you say? Well I thought you had the knack of finding loopholes on here. Yes, there have been a few but it seems they have now been rounded up and dealt with.

From recent Forum posts, it seems that users of the site are not fully reading the information that is posted to be informative and helpful when navigating the website.

Regarding your comment that I am an 'expert' at finding loopholes - I have exactly the same information in front of me as others have. The answer is to read and act on information given. It's as simple as that. Happy comping to you too 'L'

Hi Rolysb - Happy New Year to you too. Yes I found a cracking loophole once and ended up with literally twice as many ladder points as anyone else. Strangely I got quite a buzz out of this for a while but the novelty soon wore off. My favourite has to be when CC compers realised you could get ladder points for entering overseas competitions as well.

You're quite right. All the information is there if you look for it. Winners of 'Our Competitions' are announced on the same page as the next month's questions are asked (Rebus etc) except for the monthly general knowledge quiz which has its own forum slot.

I was quite relieved about the lull in 'ladder talk' but now it seems I'm beginning to become the culprit again.

Hi. I have entered the"Open the Box" competition (1 entry). It appears that coins were deducted from my total, but nothing happened. I do appreciate that this may simply mean that I didn't win anything, but would have thought it might tell me I wasn't successful? Could Admin please confirm that my entry did register? Many thanks.

Hi Aldonzo. To answer your query: something did happen. If you look above the boxes there is a grid/rules which tells you what each box might contain. Either some coins, or a voucher, or nothing. When you click on the box it reveals your 'prize'. Unfortunately you won nothing this time. Regarding Admin - there has been no response since September despite attempts to contact them. A number of issues have been raised but we are still waiting.

It's not strictly true to say the ladder points are worthless. I used mine to play the Open The Box game and won a £5 garden centre voucher (costs 1000 CC coins each time you play - these coins are accumulated at the same time as you get your ladder points and so the more ladder points you have, the more CC coins you have). There is supposed to be, on average, 1 voucher for every 64 boxes. However, I did notice on the last game, there were none.

After an initial, quite long lived craze regarding ladder points, including lots of sometimes quite heated posts in the forum (me as guilty as anyone), there are very few regular CC compers who care about or even look at the ladder anymore. There is just no point. The only reward is that the more points you achieve, the more coins you have to enter the Open The Box competition. You gain just 4 or 5 coins for each competition you enter and it 'costs' 1000 coins to open just one box (1 out of 64) - so your chances of winning are quite remote anyway. The prize for hitting the jackpot is a £10 garden centre voucher.

Are you entering competitions via the 5th icon from the right (green tick in front of two brown boxes)? You should accumulate ladder points if you enter this way.

My ladder points total is an rough indication of how many points you 'should' have if you enter every single competition. There are other more complicated ways of accumulating points such as 'liking' CC on Facebook and getting your friends to 'like' CC too, but I can't be bothered with that. I enter every single competition to try and win competitions - ladder points are just a side effect.